Coroner

A coroner is a government or judicial official who is empowered to conduct or order an inquest into the manner or cause of death. The official may also investigate or confirm the identity of an unknown person who has been found dead within the coroner's jurisdiction.

In medieval times, English coroners were Crown officials who held financial powers and conducted some judicial investigations in order to counterbalance the power of sheriffs or bailiffs.

Depending on the jurisdiction, the coroner may adjudge the cause of death personally, or may act as the presiding officer of a special court (a "coroner's jury"). The term coroner derives from the same source as the word crown.

Responsibilities of the coroner may include overseeing the investigation and certification of deaths related to mass disasters that occur within the coroner's jurisdiction. A coroner's office typically maintains death records of those who have died within the coroner's jurisdiction.

The additional roles that a coroner may oversee in judicial investigations may be subject to the attainment of suitable legal and medical qualifications. The qualifications required of a coroner vary significantly between jurisdictions and are described below under the entry for each jurisdiction. Coroners, medical examiners and forensic pathologists are different professions. They have different roles and responsibilities.^{[further explanation needed]}

The office of coroner originated in medieval England, first constituted in the reign of Richard I, and has since been adopted in many other countries whose legal systems have their roots in English or United Kingdom law.

In September 1194, the king's itinerant justices in Eyre were required to ensure that in each county of England three knights and a clerk were elected to serve as 'keepers of the pleas of the crown' (custodes placitorum coronae, from whence the word "coroner"). The duties with which the office was entrusted, and which were involved in 'keeping' the crown pleas—which included holding inquests upon dead bodies found within his jurisdiction, hearing the confessions and appeals of felons, and receiving abjurations of the realm made by felons who had taken sanctuary—were not new in 1194. Many of them had previously been performed by a range of local officials, such as the county justiciar (an office in place under Kings Henry I and Stephen), or the serjeant or baliff of the hundred. For a few decades after the institution of the office of coroner, however, his precise duties were often unclear, and there remained a degree of power-sharing with these officials: the serjeants continued to perform valid inquests on dead bodies and sometimes hear appeals and confessions as late as 1225, despite a plea of the barons to King John in 1215 that 'no sheriff concern himself with pleas of the crown without the coroners'.

"Keeping the pleas" was an administrative task, while "holding the pleas" was a judicial one that was not assigned to the locally resident coroner but left to judges who traveled around the country holding assize courts. The role of custos rotulorum or keeper of the county records became an independent office, which after 1836 was held by the lord-lieutenant of each county.